Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. This one was pretty much like the last several. We cooked the turkey per Alton Brown’s instructions and it turned out great again. I didn’t produce much in the way of great photos. The actual meal was a little fragmented because we didn’t get the food on the table until just before the Hogs started playing. We served buffet style and so didn’t load down the table with bowls and serving dishes filled with feastables, which would have made the pictures better.

I lit the table this year with a big studio strobe in each corner. My camera thanked me for not having to deal with those little Nikon SB600s this time.

While watching Alton Brown’s new Thanksgiving episode of “Good Eats” I was struck with the notion to prepare the pecan pie featured in the episode. I had to visit several stores to find the right tart pan, the right kind of syrup and the right kind of specially prepared pecans. (The recipe calls for spicy pecans but I used honey pecans.) By the way, I’d never made a pie before in my life. It was quite a hit amongst the pecan aficionados in the family.

Katie and Amy brought this game back with them from Phoenix that involves two raised boards with holes in them and tossing bags filled with corn. (Being a couple of wits, they call the game Cornhole. An inspired choice in my opinion.) I’d never heard of it but in an inspired bit of naming it’s called Cornhole and there’s an American Cornhole Association that governs the rules of play. The object is nearly identical to horseshoes in that you throw the bags and score points based on how close to the hole the bag lands. I don’t know how they got Razorback-themed boards.

Gramps had a big time with his Frankenstein mask.

Abby making her jack-o-lantern face.

A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.

Gina tried the in-your-face technique. I don’t have any pictures of Abby’s technique because she was ready to call it quits after the walk across the hot field. She did very little digging.

We took some of our dirt up to the giant water trough to try the wet method of diamond discovery. It worked no better than the dry method. We booked out of there after about 30 minutes. All in all we spent about an hour searching for diamonds.

The next day we hit the Ka-do-ha Indian Village on the outskirts of Murfreesboro. It’s a private museum/tourist trap whose claim to fame is several excavated Indian burial mounds. The holes have these little signs that explain what you’re looking at, except most of the writing on the signs has just about faded away. The bones in the bottom aren’t real. They are facsimiles of the bones that were found. The real bones were supposedly reburied somewhere else.

Ka-do-ha Indian Village is also home to the World’s Biggest Diamond.

Abby and I were looking for something to do inside out of the heat that didn’t involve watching TV, so we decided to get into the movie making bidness. We decided to give Pixar a run for their money by making a stop motion animation short as our first project. We needed a camera dolly, so I strapped my camera to the top of Abby’s Barbie VW Beetle. I positioned the camera for each shot and took care of the focusing. Abby moved the train between frames and pushed the camera’s shutter button. She also helped solve the problem of keeping the train positioned on the bridge approaches without rolling backward or forward. We’re thinking of doing a frame-for-frame homage to “Citizen Kane” for our next effort.

It’s been so hot for so long here that 105 degree days are no longer remarkable. A couple weeks ago we decided to hit the coolest spot in the state that’s not inside a building: Blanchard Springs Caverns. Abby referred to it as going into the earth.

The cavern is actually a three level affair with the third level being an underground river or creek. It emerges from the mountain at Blanchard Spring.

We stopped off at Mountain View, folk music capital of the region, to check out the street music and eat supper.

We’ve replaced Ol’ Leaky with a new pop-up camper. Abby christened it Daisy. Daisy has a number of improvements over OL, namely she doesn’t leak. And she has an air conditioner, a refrigerator and she doesn’t have that odd smell that OL had. Because Abby named the thing Daisy we thought it would be clever to take her to Daisy State Park on Lake Greeson for her maiden voyage. The temperature was approaching Hell levels so we knew it would be a stern test for the air conditioner. I didn’t have high hopes, but I was pleasantly surprised. The camper stayed quite cool, probably in the high 70′s while it was 100 outside. I even had to turn it down during the night.

We drove over to Cossatot River State Park. It was so hot that it was best to either be in the water or in an air conditioned vehicle. We stopped to swim at the Brushy Creek Recreation Area on Highway 246. Lots of people there. Later we drove around to the visitors’ center and the Highway 278 bridge.

I brought a fishing rod, but Gina caught the fish.

Cossatot rocks.

When we got up on our third day in Taos, we could see new snow on the mountain tops and decided to go back up to Taos Ski Village to check it out.

After an hour in the ski village, admiring the various view of snow capped mounatins, we took off for Colorado.

On the outskirts of San Luis, Colo., we stopped at a historical marker to take in the view of the fresh snow on the Culebra Range of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The marker said the irrigation ditch in the foreground is the San Luis People’s Ditch, dug in the 1850′s by the community and the oldest operating irrigation apparatus in the state. After San Luis we stopped off in Fort Garland to eat some of the worst road food I’ve ever had at the Cowboy Cafe. Then we visited the town’s grocery store, inside of which it remains 1975. Pretty charming actually.

Our next stop was Great Sand Dunes National Park where we had reservations at the Great Sand Dunes Lodge. Gina and I visited the sand dunes back in 1998, but only stayed there for an hour or so and barely made it past the parking lot. I’ve always wanted to go back and hike out into the dunes. We trudged about a quarter of a mile across a sandy flat to reach the first dune. When we got there Abby threw herself on the ground and started rolling in the sand.

At one point we lost her as she went rolling down the side of a dune. The wind was gusty and strong at times. The strong gusts lifted a layer of sand about a foot thick up off the ground. I guess the sand was too heavy to go any higher, need a stronger wind for that. Abby, in an amazed voice, said, “Look at the sand! It’s glowing!” The sun was shining down through the layer of blown sand and from a low angle it did indeed look like the sand surface was glowing.

The sand dunes are major geological wonder. Erosion carries sand out of the mountains and onto the vast Rio Grande Valley. The southerly winds pick that sand back up and carry it toward the Sangre de Cristos. But wind blowing downslope out of the mountains stops the southerlies and the sand drops out. Over the eons a huge dune field has formed. And although the dune field is huge, it doesn’t extend all along the mountains. Conditions are only right in one area of the valley for dune formation.

Here’s a shot of some people for perspective. Some of the individual dunes are immense. The tallest dune is 750 feet.

The lodge is situated just outside the park. Each room has a back patio with this view. I think that tallest mountain is the 14,294 foot Crestone Peak.

I took Abby and Gina to the lodge and went back out on the dunes to shoot some photos in the magic hour light.

The wind became constant and stronger as the afternoon wore on. That foot-thick layer of airborne sand was everywhere. The ground in most of my photos looks a little blurry because of the blowing sand. I liked this one because my shadow was extended beyond the rim of this dune because it was falling on the sand being blown past the edge. At one point I laid my tripod down and the wind created a tripod shaped sand drift. Also, sand stuck to every slightly lubricated part of the tripod. It’s still gritty.

Medano Creek runs along the edge of the dunes and is a big draw for dune tourists. The creek normally runs well into June, but this year the mountains had a smaller than usual snowpack and the creek was going dry by mid-June. You can actually go to the place where the creek ends and watch it soak into the sand.

While I was messing around shooting the end of the creek I turned around and saw this awesome sunset spectacle over Blanca Peak, the tallest mountain in the Sangre de Cristos at 14,345 feet.

For day 2 in Taos we headed into the mountains to see Taos Ski Valley and do a short hike. A little snow remained at the highest elevations and the snow melt creeks were running pretty well. We found this waterfall right below the idle ski lift.

The mountains are criss-crossed by miles of hiking trails, all of which had serious elevation gains. We chose the trail to Williams Lake. The trailhead was at around 10,000 feet and the lake is above 11,000, so we didn’t expect to be able to do the entire 4-mile round trip. But we made it about halfway before turning back. The trail followed a beautiful snow melt creek and the whole area was covered with Douglas fir Christmas trees.

We stopped at one point for a snack. We dug out some chips and cookies and a gang of four or five birds descended upon us looking for their share of the food. They got so close that it was unnerving at first. They would come close enough to eat cookie pieces off our shoes, but they couldn’t quite commit to eating out of our hands.

For some reason they pipe the melt water from somewhere up above into the trail-side creek.

More snow melt.

We headed back to Taos so Abby could visit a toy store she found the day before in this alley off the town square. Unfortunately, the store was already closed, so we headed up to the other end of the alley to eat at one of the town’s highly touted restaurants. As we started off, Abby squealed and I looked down to see a big splash of blood hit her leg. She’s prone to nosebleeds and the super dry air had taken its toll on her nasal passages. She immediately clamped her nose shut with her fingers just like the doctor showed her to do. The nosebleed was minor and she got it under control quickly, but she didn’t want to go inside any restaurant for fear the bleeding would start again in front of a bunch of strangers. We decided to just drive through Wendy’s and head out to the Rio Grande gorge to watch the sunset.

The gorge slices through the bottom of a flat valley. You can’t see it until you get right to it. The main attraction is the Gorge Bridge that passes 650 feet above the river, the nation’s fifth highest bridge. It’s such a big tourist attraction that people set up tables in the parking area to sell all manner of tourist geegaws and other items. One guy was selling tools, wrenches, socket sets, screwdrivers. I guess he wasn’t afraid of competing with Wal-Mart. It’s also apparently a big draw for the suicidal. We walked out to the middle of the bridge and looked around. I found it hard to get a decent photo of either the bridge or the gorge. Tall fences and big warning signsare meant to prevent the adventurous from leaving the highway right-of-way so I couldn’t really get to place for a good angle for a photo.

Abby’s first dance recital was on Sunday. It’s amazing because she dissolved into tears during the makeshift practice recital back in December and vowed to not participate in the June recital. Well she did and she did great. The video is from Saturday’s dress rehearsal because no one was allowed to take photos or videos of the real thing.